NATO set to make African debut by discreet mission in Sudan’s Darfur

BRUSSELS, May 22 (AFP) — Barring a last-minute hitch, NATO is set to make its debut in Africa by backing up an African Union peacekeeping mission in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region-although it is keen to be discreet.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer .

NATO head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who is to take part in a Darfur donors’ conference in Addis Ababa this week, said recently he was “confident” that the military alliance’s member states would take up an AU request for help.

But it is keen to stress that the African body will be in charge of the mission.

“NATO agrees this must remain and be seen to remain an AU mission with NATO intervening only in a support role,” said a NATO official, who declined to be named.

The AU so far has a 2,200-strong peacekeeping force, but this could rise to more than 7,700 by September, and perhaps 12,000 later on. Its deployment has been slowed by logistical problems and lack of enough air transport.

To help speed things up, the AU has asked both NATO and the European Union specifically for logistical support including troop transport and lodging, as well as training, communications equipment and other material.

But Sudan’s Foreign Minister Moustafa Osmane Ismail said NATO could only provide support to the AU on condition that there were “no troops other than Africans” on Darfur soil.

NATO insists that there is no question of NATO soldiers on the ground there, but said some personnel might nonetheless be necessary.

“Nobody wants to make a big show about a NATO presence in Darfur,” said a diplomat. He added that there may be “a very light” NATO presence in Darfur. “But certainly nobody wants to overshadow the AU.”

Whatever the details, a NATO presence in Africa would be a first.

The West’s former Cold War military bloc has in recent years accelerated its transformation into a force able to travel well outside its traditional European theatre of operations, and already has missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

NATO already has a number of partnership accords with north African countries, and has carried out joint manoeuvres with a number of these states. But it has never intervened on African soil.

The NATO Darfur mission is fully backed by the United States. But it has faced some reservations notably from France, whose foreign minister, Michel Barnier, said recently that NATO was not supposed to be “the world’s gendarme.”

Barnier, whose nation led a group of countries against the Iraq war, sparking an unprecedented crisis in NATO shortly before the 2003 conflict, said he would prefer the European Union (EU) to lend support to the Africans.

In fact the 25-nation EU-which has already been involved militarily in Africa, notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo where French-led forces helped calm the Ituri region-is also set to help the AU mission in Darfur.

NATO and the EU have pledged to share out the tasks, although diplomats say this may be easier said than done.

But France has not blocked NATO from tasking its military planners to draw up options for the Darfur operation.

The Darfur conflict, which pits rebels against pro-government militiamen, has killed between 180,000 and 300,000 people since the start of 2003, and triggered more than two million to flee their homes, according to UN estimates